‘What’re you doing with him?’

I’d asked Jim to drop me off in the village so I could replenish dwindling Diet Coke and biscuit supplies. Fraser had been chucking bottles into the big recycling bins over the road. The waterfalling clinks had stopped as we’d passed, and I had studiously ignored him. When I emerged from the shop he was on the porch reading the notices.

‘What’s it to you?’ I said.

Fraser was looking at me incredulously. ‘Are you shagging him?’

I started to walk away. ‘Fuck off, Fraser.’

He called after me. ‘He’s dangerous.’

Jim’s dark look, next to the jeep, blood and feathers on his hands. The hare, dripping. I turned back round. ‘Whatever, it’s no big deal.’

He gave me an odd look. Definitely no dimples for me today. ‘Are you serious?’ Jesus, how little he knew. I was dangerous, not Jim.

‘It’s just poaching.’ Hares and illegal fishing was not exactly terrifying stuff. Maybe other people had seen him taking birds apart, too.

The sun caught his face and there was a glint in his eye. ‘Right.’

He was actually jealous. ‘Have you got something of mine?’ I said.

An aloof frown. ‘No.’

‘You haven’t got anything of mine?’

‘Like what? No.’ Fraser dug into his pocket and I waited for the jingle of my keys. He produced a ten-pack of fags and plucked one out furiously.

I began to walk again.

‘Polly.’ Spoken with fag in mouth.

I stopped, but kept facing the bay.

‘You should be careful.’

‘You’re a dick,’ I flung back at him over my shoulder, hoping my arse was looking excellent.

I was lying on my back, my arms heavy at my side. Snow was falling.

It was falling onto me. Cold, wet kisses, dissolving quickly. Each flake was perfectly templated to slot into the gaps of other flakes, a complex jigsaw being constructed.

There was snow on my eyelids, awkward false lashes that I couldn’t blink away. Flakes fizzed on my lips. My face numbed. Soon it had risen up around me, as high as my shoulders – I was part of a landscape of snow, a system of low hills, snow layering around and on top of me. It filled my ears and compressed, heavy as stone.

It kept coming. A fountain of snow. And I couldn’t move.

11

Lottie was frowning at herself in the mirror in the hallway, her stomach sucked in slightly.

I put my hands round her waist from behind. ‘I’d do you.’

She put her palms on my knuckles. ‘Um. Thank you. What do you smell of?’

Fags. A little drop of mid-afternoon booze. I heard the faint rasp of an engine outside and kissed her cheek. Earl grey tea on her breath. ‘Off out.’

Her look said again? ‘Where?’

‘Just out. See you.’

We were walking in the sky.

It was so empty. I was probably leaving footprints where no human had before – apart from Jim, of course, striding through it like he personally knew every sprig of gorse, like every tree-root had a name. Which it probably did. A ridiculous one.